I particularly love foxgloves because they are steeped in fairy and goblin folklore. The spots on this old variety are lovely.

Fresh from the oven

I’ve made the odd soda bread loaf  in the past, but I’m currently pretty serious about getting into a routine of baking our own bread, inspired most recently by watching the River Cottage Everyday ‘Bread’ episode. At some point, I’d also like to try establishing my own sourdough, but I wanted to start with something straightforward. I was pretty happy with the look and taste of this chunky little loaf.

So, if you also happen to be looking for a  fool-proof home-baked baked bread recipe then I think that you really can’t go past this Simple White Loaf recipe from River Cottage.

Proving it's child's play! One of these was shaped by a four year old.

I especially love this recipe because it yields two beautiful sized loaves which means that you can immediately freeze one when it’s cool.  Make a few batches of these and you’ll soon have a load of your own bread available.

My nearly-4-year old loved kneading the dough too and got to shape her own loaf by copying me, so the dual loaf idea is great for including your kiddies in the bread-making process.

Dough is the best toy in the world

There’s something very rewarding about slicing into your own bread, the aroma and the taste is somehow more fulfilling when you’ve crafted it with your own hands.

Tip:  If using your iphone/ipad as a recipe book, read well ahead and make mental notes. Scrolling with doughy fingers = not good.

Recipe:  River Cottage Simple White Loaf 

If you need visual instructions, you can watch this six minute River Cottage Bites Basic Loaf video.

Shield bug eggs?

I found these beautiful little silver metallic eggs on the underside of a leaf.  I think they belong to a shield bug (or stink bug) and there are definitely plenty of those around from time to time.  I love the gradient pattern of colours, which I’m guessing are the result of the eggs being at different stages of development? Looks like a design.

As most shield bugs are plant pests, and like to suck sap, I have to say they aren’t exactly welcome to set up big colonies in my garden – unless they are the good guys (and I don’t know how to work that out yet). I’m going to keep an eye out for the bugs and see if I can learn something about who they are over summer.

Even if they are the pest variety,  I can definitely still appreciate their spot in the ecosystem and admire the beauty of their eggs. Respect your enemies.

I’ve heard of planting tomatoes to grow upside down, but had never considered  you could ripen them this way too. The advantage is that all the nutrient in the branches and leaves is apparently put into the tomato fruit and you get the same juicy fruits as you would have, had you been the middle of the sunny blue-skied growing season.Add to this that Richard had to pull my tomatoes out to make way for a wood store, and I decided that trying out the hanging method made lots of sense this year.

Just-hung tomatoes

We just hung them against the fence, in a position of fuller sun than they had been when in the ground. You could put them somewhere more sheltered out of the rain.

Half of the daily harvest (Fionna ate 5 before I could take the photo)

And…it works! In the one week that ours have been hanging, they are ripening daily and there’s a steady daily supply.

After a week, I pruned back some of the dying branches today to let more sun in and help the plant put it’s energy into the remaining tomatoes.

I’m actually really impressed with the concept of doing this because it seems such a waste of a plant’s energy, to just rip up tomatoes bushes at the end of the season. Sometimes you have to do to make space for your winter crops, or in our case, a wood store. If we hadn’t moved them into the sun the unripened ones would have just rotted on the vine as the winter came in. This will definitely be an end-of-summer routine task from now on.

As I’ve just stopped work to have our second baby, I’m keen to really revert more to my natural inclination towards living frugally. We have two professional incomes but my soul properly sings when I can grow food, reuse things and hunt for second hand stuff. It just makes me happy.  It just costs a little more time that can sometimes be snaffled during a working/parenting week.

I was looking through Hugh’s cookbook in a browsy way, wondering if I could make something nice for our 11th anniversary on Saturday. One recipe caught my eye as it said “perfect with home-made chutney”.  Richard had just crafted a delicious batch of home-made chutney last week with our plentiful supply of green tomatoes.

The recipe is called Bill’s Rona Oatcakes, and when it dawned on me that this was from the Isle of Rona near Skye, I had to know more. With a quick search online, I found out that the recipe was from Bill Cowie who is the only permanent resident on Rona.

After reading the Isle of Rona website and seeing Bill’s  Images of Rona collection, I was besotted with the place. Next time we travel to the UK (which we do every few years) I feel determined that we’ll have a family holiday there. I feel drawn.

Richard and I have spent lots of time in Scotland and have a deep love of the islands, and they form a large part of my mystic/romantic dreams of the ideal place in terms of the natural world.  Growing up with Scottish parents probably sowed the seeds of my love for that wild landscape, but now having also spent time in Scotland, that feeling of awe and love is so easily conjured. When I listen to celtic music, memories of all the times we’ve spent in the highlands and islands flicker throgh my mind and fill my heart – so brim full. Sometimes I can so vividly summon up the landscape, I feel like I can go there anytime I need to. My favourite holiday of ours was cycling and camping some of the Hebrides, and I have a soft spot for Sutherland on the mainland, and love the islands I’ve so far visited which are Iona, Mull, Skye and the Orkneys. But not Rona yet….not yet…but I can dream!. .

Rona sounds truly like the idyllic wild holidays that Richard and I love. No shops or roads, one permanent resident and only a few holiday cottages – a place where you can walk in rain and sun showers, catch fish and cook them on an open fire, relax by the fireside in the evening with whisky or heather beer, gaze at the clear night sky, eat kippers for breakfast while watching a rainshower, look for plants and wildlife on land and sea – generally just adore feeling little in nature’s big beautiful vastness.

Suddenly, this oatcake recipe was just not about biscuits for chutney  - it had leapt off the page into my dreaming mind – and the oatcakes became symbolic  - little oaty tokens that represented a taste of a future ideal – a family holiday on Rona.

It wasn’t long before I was  infusing the kitchen with some delicate tunes from my celtic playlist –  and the mood was well and truly set.  I had decided to make some of these oatcakes for Richard as his wedding anniversary present!

A well-baked tune -click to listen

Click to listen

Oatcakes made with love

I accept that in terms of gift-giving, some little oaty cakes might sound a bit cheap, and like my frugality has gone a little over the top – but we don’t generally do anniversary presents anyway. Also, being just a week away from giving birth means we’re not really up for going out for a meal anyway, and are planning to have a normal Saturday together with Fionna – and have something with chutney for tea!

Yes, a first attempt at baking oatcakes are probably going to turn out to be imperfect, and experimental as I’ve never made them before – but homemade gifts appeal to my quest to use money for living experiences – like holidays to the Island of Rona!  Lets just hope Richard doesn’t mind a few half-baked biscuits instead of something made of stainless steel for 11 years of marriage! (I did after all make him a minature cosmos for our 10th!)

Anyway, cheers to Shug and Brian for putting this recipe into a cookbook and consequently, mixing all the ingredients in my head into a hearty, wild family holiday dream.

Romancing the oatcakes

Let’s hope Rona oatcakes and chutney turn out to be a marriage made in heaven. But it’s not just about chutney and oats –  there’s more to enjoy – these oatcakes go well with cheese and marmalade too!  This is how I came full circle with my great insight (bear in mind, I have a crazy pregnancy brain) to  think of our marriage as being just like chutney and oatcakes too: we compliment each other, both mature with age, and yet, are equally and individually enhanced by some lovely condiments…er…children.

In my experience of marriage, it’s just as  romantic being a mother and father together as it is a husband and wife. Now to me, that sounds like the right sort of ingredients in a recipe for happy times ahead.

I found this beautiful site called Adventures in Urban Sustainability which is a very inspiring record of one couple and their attempt to create a food forest in a normal backyard in the suburbs near Wollongong, NSW.

Seeing what you can achieve in a normal block made me really happy and excited. Leaving our 20 acre farm felt like a step backwards in my ideal of living sustainability – but I’m really beginning to see that our ‘normal’ house,  the timing of moving here, my time off work with our second baby imminent has really created this massive opportunity that I’m not likely to get again. It’s an opportunity to do some really proper planning and design around creating a garden that’s about living  and playing space and growing food.

Our house already has solar panels, rainwater, solar hot water and a blank canvas back garden with lots of food growing potential. Already we have dramatically reduced our energy use and reliance on cars compared to the costs of maintaining our farm on the hill.

So, we’re actually ‘greener’ for having moved nearer to town without much effort on our part. It fascinates me to think of what we can achieve when we ramp things up with proper effort.

I definitely miss being surrounded by trees and wildlife- and the ‘feeling’ of living an alternative lifestyle on the farm on the hill – but in terms of living life in a way that is better for the planet – it should be less about the aesthetics and image of where you live – and more about the practical and efficient use of the space in our immediate environment.

Back to the dreaming and planning for now….

The new place came with veggie beds, but they are neglected and need to be moved, so until then, this teeny tiny patch is my passion.